Muslim leader gets death threat

Letter calls Islam `religion of Satan'

The head of Florida's most prominent Muslim group told the FBI on Wednesday that he had received a death threat.

Altaf Ali, executive director of the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he received the threat calling Islam "the religion of Satan" in the mail Monday.

The two-page letter came in an envelope addressed to him in large letters, he said. Inside, a handwritten message read, "Death to Islam," and called Ali "a walking dead man." It also included a cartoon picturing nuclear bombs raining down on mosques in Medina and Mecca, the two holiest cities in Islam, he said.

Ali said he did not report the threat until he talked to his wife and realized how frightened she was.

"It's only when my wife became alarmed that I saw this was more important," Ali said. "She said, `Listen, can you put up the hurricane shutters?'"

Two FBI agents arrived at his office Wednesday morning, he said.

Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Miami field office, confirmed the bureau was investigating the death threat. "We want to double-check to see if there are similar letters being sent," she said.

Ali said the cartoon and the letter's text closely resembled a letter sent to the director of CAIR's Michigan branch this week. Last year, the council reported a rise in discrimination and hate crimes against Muslims in the United States, and Ali wrote in a recent South Florida Sun-Sentinel opinion piece that vandalism against South Florida Islamic centers has surged.

Ali said more graffiti at local mosques and anti-Muslim discrimination often follow periods of unrest in the Muslim world, but the latest rise in vandalism seemed unrelated to news events.

The most recent vandalism against Muslims in South Florida occurred at Nur Ul Islam Academy in Cooper City, where a nontoxic white powder was found spread around the school.

Sofian Abdelaziz, director of the American Muslim Association of North America in Miami, described menacing e-mails as a constant in his line of work, although he has never received anything on the level of a death threat. Most aggravating, he said: Islamic texts he mails to interested people sometimes go missing. On one occasion, some of the books in a box he mailed had been replaced by Christian texts when they arrived at their destination, he said.

"We have to keep reaching out," Abdelaziz said. "People who understand us better know there is bad and good in every culture. This is all coming from lack of knowledge."

Ruth Morris can be reached at rmorris@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5012.